The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Common entrance test
Relief to students, boost to learning

The decision to replace the All-India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) and the Joint Entrance Examination with a common test for all Centrally funded technical institutes such as IITs and NITs from 2013 will foremost bring the relief of not having to take two separate tests. Besides reducing the stress and expenses, it will also lead to a more uniform assessment. The Union HRD Minister has urged the states and private institutes too to adopt the test, as students, not sure of their performance in one examination, tend to take as many tests as they can or are eligible for. A few states, including Haryana, have already accepted the proposal. Those holding out should accept it too in the interest of students and quality.

More than the common examination, what has stirred debate is the criteria to decide merit. Now at least 40 per cent weightage will be given to Class 12 score, the rest being the score in a two-part entrance test. There were apprehensions over how the varying marking patterns of different school boards would be taken into account. That has been addressed by devising a mathematical formula that takes into account the peculiarities of each. The benefit of giving weightage to board results would be a more comprehensive assessment and boost to classroom education, which was suffering under the current system. The ‘coaching centre’ culture fuelled by entrance tests too would go down, giving a more level field to poor students.

Despite the obvious benefits, concerns remain. Certain states want the common examination to be conducted in languages other than English and Hindi too. The level of education in the schools of different states may affect Class 12 scores. Clarity would also be needed on the formats of the two parts of the new examination. Given the multiple issues, and the fact that careers of a large number of students are involved, the government must ensure every aspect is completely thought through in advance, and there is no element of experimentation.

Coping with failure
A dirge on Indian cricket is unwarranted

Knives are out again following the Indian cricket team’s disappointing performance in Australia. The fans, mercifully, have not yet attacked houses of cricketers or taken out mock funeral processions, as they did in the past. But media reports and discussions on television have been too quick to disparage the ability, application, skill and motivation of the team. The search for scapegoats has prompted reports questioning selection of players, the rotation policy favoured by the Captain and perceived rifts in the team. The suitability of Mahendra Singh Dhoni as captain, his lack of technique as a batsman and his failures as a wicketkeeper have all been discussed exhaustively and clinically. So has the question of Sachin Tendulkar struggling through the tour and whether the great batsman should have hung his boots by now. This is by now a familiar and a predictable pattern. When the team wins, narrowly or otherwise, we tend to lionise the team; and when it loses, we are too quick to trash them.

Whether sports can build character or not, they certainly do reveal character of both participants and spectators alike. While sports train people to be humble in victory and accept defeat gracefully, defeat somehow brings out the worst in us, raising doubts on whether we love the game of cricket or if we merely love winning. While players have been pulled up for showing their middle finger to the spectators and for unsportslike behaviour in the field, no such restriction or restraint seems applicable to the media or to the fans. Rather than promoting sportsmanship, competitive cricket in this country appears to have encouraged a ‘win-at-all-costs’ mentality, which bristles at every defeat and goes overboard following each victory.

While winning is important, consistency and learning to cope with failures are even more important. This is not the first Indian team to go to pieces abroad. Indeed, very few Indian teams have performed well away from home and discussions should focus more on finding an explanation. Even England, which easily defeated India at home last year, crumbled soon thereafter during the visit to India. The reaction in England was similar to the reaction we see here and now. Success, said Churchill, was moving from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Who knows, failures could still be the pillars of success.

Thought for the Day

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. — Benjamin Disraeli

ARTICLE

Whither Indian politics?
Criminals still in the electoral arena
by Justice Rajindar Sachar (retd)

DEMOCRACY is a basic feature of our Constitution. Parliament and legislative assemblies are instruments created to give effect to the democratic content of people governing themselves. Political parties are the medium through which representatives are elected. It stands to reason that after the election, the implementation of the principles and policies continue or should continue to govern the programme. That is, of course, textbook teaching; but how close are these sound principles to the reality of the present-day politics.

A mini general election with the largest state of UP going to the polls seems the right time to have a clear look at the way our political parties treat the elections and their social and political philosophy to woo the voters.

The minimum test for a candidate should certainly be that he/she is not involved in the violation of criminal law. That is why the Supreme Court, as far back as in 2002 in a writ petition filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties, directed that a proposed candidate should disclose whether there is a criminal charge-sheet against him at least six months before the date of election so that the voter may try to avoid politicisation of crime in the sense that criminals should not be elected so as to prevent them from wielding power. But, alas, India continues to remain a mystery to not only foreigners but even to us because we find that political parties still continue to warmly welcome criminal elements to their fold.

Thus, of the 337 candidates (up to the 5th phase) for the UP election, about 32 per cent belonging to parties like the SP, the BSP, the Congress and the BJP have serious criminal charges pending against them.

This is so notwithstanding the warning about criminal elements in our legislatures given by the Vice-President of India at the All-India Whips Conference, "Exactly 23 per cent of MPs elected in 2004 had criminal cases registered against them — over half of these cases could lead to imprisonment for five years or more. The situation is worse in the case of MLAs". Contrast it with Europe (Not that I am fond of political standards in Europe). But recently the President of the German Republic resigned because he had threatened a person who was demanding the repayment of a loan given to the President, or in England where a Cabinet minister resigned because he made his wife take the blame for rash driving when he himself was driving the car. How ironical that all the major political parties in India are resisting the framing of a law debarring persons charged with criminal offence from contesting elections.

Another grim reality of the elections in Punjab and UP is the amount of illegal money circulating and the distribution of drugs and liquor, the danger of which the present Chief Election Commissioner has highlighted and election expenses are mentioned to have gone up to Rs 5 crore per seat. Is it not farcical to call these elections free and fair?

No party is talking of real problems. Minorities are being treated as the football of politics. An unacceptable competition of claiming the custodians of minorities is being given by some parties by pressing the panic button of security while, on the contrary, some parties are donning the artificial garb of nationalism. This is insulting the minorities. They are nobody's pawns. They are equal, proud citizens of India. The parties that behave in such a manner are ignoring the well-established code of universal human rights which proclaims, "In any country the faith and the confidence of the minorities in the impartial and even functioning of the State is the acid test of being a civilised State. This is accepted wisdom."

The real problems worrying the electorate are many and yet there is conspiratorial silence maintained by all the parties. A report by Save the Children (NGO) shows that more than 100 million children in our country have not enough to eat; 24 per cent families say their children go without food for one day — what a tragic mockery that the Central government is resisting the PUCL petition in the Supreme Court for the right to food for all on the specious plea of lack of funds, while merrily and proudly proclaiming its purchase of 126 Jet fighter aircraft for thousands of crores of rupees. This perverse priority is further heightened by the admission of a Central minister that India accounts for 60 per cent open defecation in the world — the reason being that building toilets requires Rs 8000 each, but, under the government’s norms, only Rs 3000 is provided. Can there be a more sardonic double talk? And yet no party is talking about these issues.

Of course, all parties are talking of giving laptops (the irony of untruth is so stark when the fact is that 40 per cent of India is not electrified) and motor cycles to students, without batting an eyelid or feeling ashamed that a large number of schools do not even have black boards or toilets for girl students.

In 2009, as many as 17,368 farmers killed themselves. Agricultural growth being the mainstay of the Indian economy has remained stagnant for a decade at 1.6 per cent, and it has now slipped to 0.4 per cent. The Planning Commission in its report of 2011 had to admit the gross inequality of assets wherein top 5 per cent people possess 38 per cent of the total assets and the bottom 60 per cent owning a mere 13 per cent. There is a high incidence of poverty among the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes and one-third of Muslims live below poverty line.

In spite of this dark reality, no major parties in the elections even mentioned these vital issues. This shows an attitude of contempt like that of the old feudal master towards his serfs. This contempt towards the electorate cannot be described better than what I chanced to see on my computer in a blog posted by one teenager thus: "It is time for the next elections and his previous promises have not begun. I am a very young child and today I have learnt that you can call politics corruption too."

Parties should seriously heed the warning given by Baba Ambedkar who on November 26, 1949, warned, "How long should we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life….. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from this inequality will blow at the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously built up."

The writer is a retired Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court.

MIDDLE

Players and spares
by V. K. Kapoor

Behind every great fortune, there is a crime”, said Balzac. The past illuminates the future, and the world has always been the same. The same things come back with different names under different colours. There is no going back in life, no second chance.

The history of mankind is the history of class struggle, but the leader emerges as the expression of the class and, therefore, the history of mankind is the history of its readers and rulers. The spirit of an epoch is determined by he who made the epoch. The players make the epoch. The rulers and leaders are the players. They have the ability to fling themselves at life without anybody holding their hand, and taking on the world without allies.

Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah emerged as the sanctified icons of the Independence movement. The decision taken by these political players affected the destinies of millions.

I remember a conversation with the then DIG of Lahore. I had gone there for the World Cup with the Indian Hockey Team. There was a lot of nostalgia. He told me that his mother came from Amritsar. I told him that my wife belonged to Sialkot. He used some choicest Punjabi invectives for the leaders held responsible for Partition. He said he could not visit his “nanihal”, and I could not visit my “sasural”.

The players have departed, but the spares are still bearing the consequences. Anything which is rooted in resentment can never be successful. Lamhon ne khata ki thi/ Sadiyon ne saza payee

Time is the true narcotic of pain. Either the pain disappears when it runs its course or a person learns to live with it.

In fact, in all walks of life, there are players and spares. Players are the reality and action-oriented. Their focus is on the product, not on the process. It does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. They are born with manipulative chromosomes and believe in quick tangible results. They listen with the “third ear” and observe with the “third eye”.

Spares have a sense of the chances missed, the ships that have crossed at night. They look at their situation selectively and pass their own moral judgment. Subjectivity translates itself into wishful thinking. This mass of men leads lives of quiet desperation.

There are players and spares in almost every walk of life. Such souls are there among bureaucrats and police personnel too. Players manage to remain on the right side of power and get good postings irrespective of the regimes. Spares languish on the margins.

I asked a senior bureaucrat about the quantum of work he did. He told me that the government was annoyed with him and he was doing a side job. He said cynically that for him a file was like “Draupadi” coming once in a while. I asked a senior cop about his posting. He replied “Khuda Line” (a side job) as usual, but I have an office and a car. He said he belonged to the useless spares of the department.

The number of spares is very large. Players are few and they remain at the centre-stage of life in all walks of life.

Paul Vallery said, “The world improves through the extraordinary, but the average give it stability.”

OPED — WOMEN

Daughters…shall remain
daughters!
In a society that is becoming increasingly promiscuous, the conflict between our traditional values and new found mores, hurts no one else more than the fair sex
Rajesh Gill

Everybody says that times have changed and today, there is no difference between a son and a daughter. An increasing number of people also go to the extent of arguing that daughters are an asset to parents in contemporary times, since it is they, and not the sons, who rush to the rescue of their aging parents, whenever the latter are in need of care and support.

Girls are no less than boys

Every other day, some NGO or a political party flashes photographs in the newspapers showing the celebration of the birth of a girl, eulogising daughters. There are at times occasions when parents of a newly born girl distribute sweets, sending the message that they no longer distinguish between a daughter and son. In the metropolitan cities, one comes across hundreds of girls driving on the roads, working in banks, post offices, educational institutions, airlines, private and corporate offices, BPOs and so on, indicating that a gender sensitive social structure is coming up. Uplifting of girls and women has become the most valuable slogan among the politicians and policy makers too. It sounds really optimistic and it seems we are close to kicking off the age old male chauvinism. Who says girls are inferior to boys? In fact, girls are making their parents proud by excelling in the fields of sports, education, science and technology, art, literature and so on. It fills one with great pride when one finds young women flying the aircraft, managing the difficult traffic, pronouncing progressive judgments in courts, managing the police force and so on. One starts feeling as if gone are the days when we Indians used to distinguish between sons and daughters.

Crime against fair sex continues

Yet as one turns the side, one gets bombarded by the data on the shrinking sex ratio, especially the alarmingly declining child sex ratio, the increased crime against women in the shape of molestation, rape, sexual harassment at workplace, other sex related crimes, dowry deaths and so on, reminding one that the situation perhaps is not as rosy as it seems. Every now and then, a female infant is found in the garbage, most probably abandoned by her own mother or some close relative. It is very normal for an expectant mother to get rid of a female foetus, irrespective of whether she is illiterate or educated, rural or urban, rich or poor. Men raping girls as old as two years or four years is an extremely common incident, which hardly seems to affect the psyche of people, except those having very young daughters. Having statutorily prohibited dowry way back in 1961, it is a pity that our daughters continue to get murdered by their husbands and their relatives. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), there were 1,948 convictions and 3,876 acquittals in dowry death cases in year 2008. According to the Indian police, every year it receives over 2,500 reports of bride-burning. The Indian National Crime Records Bureau reports that there were about 8172 dowry death cases registered in India in 2008, an increase by 14.4 per cent since 1998. Apart from these crimes, the most rampant kind of violence against young girls is eve teasing, which has been interpreted as 'little rape' in academia. It is unfortunate that till date, the onus of eve teasing is generally placed on the victim herself. The booklet containing safety tips issued by the Delhi Police some time back is one such step, telling girls to remain invisible and non-existent. Under the circumstances, can we still claim that daughters are going to be the first choice of parents in near or even distant future?

Why people long for sons?

Do we have to still pose this question to ourselves? It is not difficult to understand that why even today, when girls are doing much better than boys in education and employment, people continue to long intensely for sons. The reasons are not very hard to find, considering the statistics given above. Moreover, a daughter has always been considered as an avoidable investment while a son is believed to give financial support to the family. Actually, there are some trends in contemporary social situations which are thwarting the very cause of gender equality.

I am reminded of the true story of a poor woman toiling hard to raise her family which included her young daughter of 17 years, attending her school. The mother would starve herself in order to ensure that her daughter received good education, passed with a respectable percentage, wishing her to settle down in life as a better placed person than she herself was. One fine day, the woman was found madly pleading at the police station, begging for help since her daughter, a minor, had been abducted by somebody. Totally shattered, with no help from the police, she kept running here and there without food or sleep, thinking that it would have been better had she killed the wicked daughter when she was born.

Then there was recently a news report which stated how a young man found his sister in a compromising position with her lover at their home in Punjab, during midnight when parents were away and he killed both of them. The case was labelled as one of honour killing. One wonders as to what a normal person would do on encountering such a provocative situation as this one. There have been numerous cases citing a similar human reaction to a provocative situation in the form of murder, judged as a normal human reaction, thus deserving a relatively lenient view.

Different standards for girls

Parenting a daughter becomes an all the more daunting task when you have to send her out first for education and then for work, at the same time expecting from her a behavior that does not put her parents to public shame. The daughter carries on her head all the burden of family honour while her brother enjoys a complete immunity. With the ever increasing violent crimes against women, while a middle class parent brings up the daughter just like a son, she is repeatedly not allowed to accompany her class mates to a trip, because of the fears which are multiple. The daughter keeps on complaining to her mother as to why she has to meet the frenzy of her parents on having been seen with a male friend, while her brother keeps on changing his girl friends without any objection from them. The daughter quietly gets on to her mother and asks her with moist eyes as to why they have different standards for her and her brother when she is more talented, hardworking and sincere. The mother, herself greatly pained, tells her "you are my very dear daughter, but see you are a daughter and you can't be a son."

Traditional vs modern values

When the working parents leave home in the morning for work and get to learn that it was a "Kiss Day" and that the radio channels are working very hard to teach the youngsters the significance of different types of kisses, fear runs through their spine, thinking of what their daughter would be doing. The mother curses herself for having no time for the daughter, who might also have been celebrating the Kiss Day and tomorrow who knows there might be a "Sex Day" too.

Daughters are more talented than sons, true, and therefore, they have to be sent out for education, training and work. But the messages on the radio channels telling the young boys to carry condoms on the Valentine's Day, when they go to enjoy with their girls friends, send shivers in the parents who have young daughters, somewhere in the same or some other city, pursuing their education or career. It is one thing to say that if boys can enjoy premarital sex, why can't girls; but it is altogether another thing to accept the statement for your own daughter. Yes, society is an extremely forceful factor that governs all of us. The news on gender violence is absorbed very differently by different kinds of parents. Parents of young daughters, especially the middle class, smitten by the cultural idioms, absorb these messages in an altogether peculiar manner, given the fact that enjoyment of sex has very different consequences for boys and girls. I remember one poor domestic maid, perpetually worried about her daughter's safety once saying "Isn't it very strange that a man, even if extremely weak, addict and old, is invariably able to overpower a young and healthy girl and rape her!"

With an extremely unsafe environment for women, coupled with a highly commercialised celebration of sexual activity, often symbolised as a fundamental right, daughters shall continue to be either the second or no choice when parents have to remain away at work, leaving the children at the mercy of a society that is getting extremely promiscuous. While we switch over to different dressing styles, adopt novel food habits, flaunt latest technology, discarding the older one overnight, we find it too hard, if not impossible to dump our existing attitudes and cultural idioms so quickly. In other words, while we appear to be western and modern in physical appearance, we find ourselves pulled back by the age old mindset that we inherit from our culture. What follows is a confusion….the biggest casualty of which is, of course, the daughter!

The writer is chairperson, Departments of Women's Studies and Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh